Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• FRIEDMAN, NATALIE

Titel

Marriage and the Immigrant Narrative: Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements

Ist Teil von

• Legacy, 2005-06, Vol.22 (2), p.176-186

Ort / Verlag

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2005

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The novel, however, unveils the limitations of [Sonya]'s efforts at playing the vamp: Sonya eventually learns that in trying to seduce [John Manning], she is capitulating to stereotypes of what JoAnn Pavletich has called the "exotic primitive" within the dominant culture.(7) Further, as Mary Dearborn writes, the "ethnic woman suffers considerably from the consequences of being associated with the erotic" (131); one way of eroticizing her is to stamp her as being passionate and overemotional. Dearborn argues that it is "stock in the trade of sexism to accuse women of hysteria, overemotionalism. To accuse a Jewish woman of these traits is to traffic in antiSemitism" (132). [Anzia Yezierska] deploys the tropes of exoticism and anti-Semitism in her redaction of Manning's subjectivity. Manning desires Sonya because of her otherness; he is unable to see Sonya as an American and perceives her instead as "a flame of life -- a vivid exotic -- a miraculous priestess of romance who had brought release for the ice of his New England heart" (106). Manning, however, is guilty of ignoring or repressing his own desires, which lurk beneath his icy "New England" exterior. His longing for Sonya reveals his own passionate urges and a rather rapacious sexual appetite, which he associates with "otherness." Yezierska's narrative immediately shifts to Manning's perspective, and the reader is privy to his thoughts. Seduced, he "fought an overwhelming madness to thrust civilization aside, tear the garments that hid her beauty from him, put out his hands over her naked breasts and crush her to him?. But he was terrified at his own relapse to the primitive" (106). Yezierska's use of the last word is deliberate -- she demonstrates how Manning sees Sonya and the danger she presents to him. He must reform her and Americanize her or else she threatens his own sense of civilization through her sexual desirability and her ethnic emotionalism. Manning's fear that he will succumb to his hidden inner "primitive" reflects the greater national paranoia of the time about the "rising tide" of ethnic immigrants and the threat they posed to the imaginary, stereotypical Puritan ideal of American behavior: stoicism, temperance, and civilized manners. Yezierska's preference for labor as a means for immigrant women to achieve success is crystallized at the end of the novel. The novel seems to be moving toward a typical happy ending with all the right ingredients: an impending marriage, a thriving business, and a contented heroine. The novel then surprises the reader by taking a violent turn. Long after their divorce and Sonya's alignment with [Jacques Hollins], Manning returns to Sonya and forces his way into her apartment, tearing off her clothes, shouting, "You -- you -- you're mine?. Oh, my beautiful, maddening Jewess!" (181). Manning's speech, while evocative of his earlier thoughts on Sonya's desirability, represents the worst way in which the New York outside Sonya's "pale of settlement" sees women like her. The melodramatic cry is the outward expression of the narrator's earlier warning -- that Manning's relationship with Sonya is indeed a time bomb. The violence of the scene suggests the utter breakdown of a possible union between Sonya and Manning because of his inability to see Sonya as anything but an "exotic primitive," a madnessinducing siren. At this point in the text, one would hope that Sonya, a shrewd businesswoman, a fighter, and a "vamp," would use her wiles or her cunning to condemn the man who used her vilely. In the bewildering concluding scene, however, she forgives Manning, revealing that she still loves him: "She knew that Manning was an experience which had burned forever into the texture of her life" (183). In effect, Yezierska's finale demonstrates that Sonya herself has, to some degree, internalized the American equation of exogamous marriage with the myth of the American Dream. She may forever see Manning as an erotic object of desire, but part of the desire has been bound up with her imagination of Manning as a wealthy and therefore "authentic" American. Sexual access to Manning will mean complete access to America. Once Sonya finds out that Manning's work is based on faulty principles, and that his love for her is based on ethnic stereotypes, the scales fall from her eyes: she sees that her desire for him is simply a "Romance," an adventure story that is as eternal as the biblical tale from which the novel takes its name.